you taste like supernovas
by all the lost souls
Summary: featuring: a sad sort of girl - a vulnerable boy - a 'titanic' scenario - ventures in the land of shadows - a fleeting decision - and the countless repercussions that ensue. MassieJames, eventual MassieJosh. halloween exchange for ana/shell games.


**you taste like supernovas**

**.**

_we break with speed  
>that girl can read my racing thoughts<em>  
><span>my racing thoughts<span>, jack's mannequin.

.

They look at each other with tired eyes.

She looks down, and James understands. He reaches for her hand, and they fall.

The water hurts.

It's so dark and there's _bodies_ and she can't feel the ground and she can't swim and neither can he—

She chokes up water and he wraps his arms around her and digs his fingers into her back and doesn't let go.

.

Massie is rushed through the doors to white bleakness and smells of sterile injections and lead and death.

.

He didn't survive. She finds out as much from her hysterical mother, who can't even summon the decency to pretend that she cares. Not now, anyways, not when her little jewel is safe, reputation untarnished.

Her heart starts racing and her fists clench so hard against the edge of the bed that her fingers ache, and it's like she can't breathe anymore, and she tries desperately not to scream. She asks Kendra, ever so politely, to leave, and curls into herself on the patterned comforter, knees drawn in, head bent, eyes tightly shut. There's a sudden spasmodic urge to throw up; she bites it back.

Her skin is tingling. Nerves are pulsing. Heart trying to purge itself from the position in her throat.

_He drowned, Massie. He's gone._

.

Massie Block often wonders when she became so selfish, to try to ruin everyone else's happiness for her own.

After this revelation comes to her, she begins to spend her days ripping the pages of his favourite books into precise, conceptualized shreds, because the way she sees it, the world has no use of them anymore.

(And if they were therapeutic to her at the same time, well, they had to be going to a good cause, right?)

.

_A thousand scientists couldn't understand the simplest part of us, from the way I see your name in the dust and the smoke and the sunlight that cracks from your old window, to the way we talk to each other with just our hands, a skyline made from silent laughs and secret smiles. There's the you and me in my head, the ones made from graphite and sunsets and type-writer words that's so over thought and oversaid I can only hear static, and even I can't understand that._

.

Looking down at the newspaper in front of her, all the letters blur together and twist and warp around until they don't resemble the original words at all. Instead, they become memories – memories of James, mostly, and his vocal reaction to discovering that the ship was sinking and their (her) lives were in danger; memories of the way his mother looked when she came to visit her, a few days after; of the way others had treated her, almost cautiously, because he doubled back to save her and never came back; of the way her only real friend seemed to be Josh these days because everyone else had deserted her, for the simplistic reason that she had survived and he hadn't.

_._

A whistle shrieks in protest in the distance, temporarily drowning out the calls of 'come on, girls, another two rounds to go', and Massie comes to a halt, the assortment of mud-encrusted dirt and rocks under her sneakers screeching in undignified protest.

In the murky water of the stream she had been running parallel to for the last twenty minutes, she sees her reflection. Brown eyes, dark ringlets - it's all so characteristic of her that she's almost forgotten how to _really_ look at it. But there's something limp in her ringlets, something dead in her blue eyes. There's something that reminds her that she's _not_ Kendra. She's not the beauty queen of her year. She's less girly, less popular.

Somehow, that doesn't bother her at all.

.

Her ghosts are always there.

Most of the time, she feels them there, but sometimes she can see them; through the haze of cigarette smoke: ghosts; memories that dance around her room like shadows, their presence feeling like fingertips ghosting over her skin – never quite there but constant.

They play in her head over and over, nagging and asking why she hasn't said goodbye yet.

She'd tried, she really has.

Because she's sat in the library with it's window open and she's stared out of it, the word on the tip of her tongue. Because she's placed a teddy bear at the foot of a bonfire. Because she swears she's tried everything and Christ, this is a lot harder than necessary.

Vaguely she thinks to herself that she ought to be more scared, like she was the first time they appeared. But, then she sees a crooked grin and deep brown eyes, and instead she utters,

"Stay."

.

Josh snaps on a Monday and buys a chocolate cake from the baker who, once he's heard who it's for, insists that he can have it for free.

Kendra hugs him when he knocks on their door. Her whole family is already here, and the TV is turned on. She looks so much smaller than he remembers.

Josh slams the white box on their kitchen table. She stares at him blankly.

"We're having a celebration," he announces. "You're going to eat this goddamn cake, and you're going to _enjoy_ eating it."

_For her. Because she's breathing._

And Massie, her eyelashes wet, picks up a fork.

.

(constellations in his fingers and craters forming his cheeks moon skin crescent eyes  
>the best things about him make up the whole sky)<p>

.

Dancing with Massie, James comes to realize, is almost as nice as one of those blueberry scones she used to be so wicked at stirring up. She's warm and small, and she fits much more easily into his arms than Nikki did. She also doesn't lead him around like a mule, probably because she's only a slightly better dancer than he is.

_And_ he hasn't stepped on her toes once. James feels quite proud when he smiles at her, right as the partner switch music picks up. Carefully, he twirls Massie away towards and turns around in time to catch her in his arms.

.

In her nightmares, he's waiting, sitting on the familiar fountain. He looks older, somehow, or just more tired.

Massie finds she's crying as he crushes his lips to hers, burying his fingers in her tangled hair. God, it's been almost three hundred and sixty-five days since he's kissed her, and she doesn't think she can ever make up for it.

"Don't you ever leave me again," she says, not quite as desperately as that night, but close, clutching the leather jacket she'd made him wear.

He stares at her, eyes empty.

"Don't," she says again, as if saying it a million times would make it possible or probable or something at least _close_.

He smiles bitterly and doesn't promise her anything.

.

1:04 in the afternoon. Massie waits in the sweetshop line, but for once she feels out of place in the maze of dozens of blonde-haired girls wearing priceless designer labels that weren't stained by blood water.

She buys a tin of jellybeans for her father and a carton of vanilla ice cream that will definitely melt before she gets home. Maybe her mother won't be so busy working and instead she'll make shortcake like she used to, with strawberries. They they'll have fresh cake and cold ice cream and feel sick to their stomachs but invincible.

What really happens: a little boy pushes her hard and grabs her bag, and the jellybeans spill in all directions. He runs off with the sweating ice cream, and everyone averts their gaze.

There's a tear in her dress, her knee is skinned, and the cotton of her dress is uncomfortably damp from waiting outside all day. Massie scoops the candy back into the tin, and no one leaves their place in line to help her.

He came riding along a dusty track, the boy with the bike and a crooked smile, helping her off the ground and cleaning up her bloody knees. When she returns home, she finds her mother's already sleeping and can't be disturbed, which means no cake and no piano—but she doesn't really care for playing them Tchaikovsky anyway.

Her father grins as she gives him the jellybeans, - he's absolutely _thrilled_ she's making progress - but complains the rest of the evening about the sweetshop's incompetence because they taste like dirt.

.

Josh comes by to see her on a Monday a little over two months afterwards, and they end up sitting on her bed, holding hands while they look out the window as it rains. They talk and watch as the windows fog up, laughing and reading poems and writing quotes and maps and names in stray highlighter ink on each other's arms and while she doesn't forget, for the first time she feels happy, even without James. And even when she sees _us_ on the window (and it makes her fingertips tingle even though she can barely see it), all she can do is tilt her head, and the corners of her too-pale lips curve into a sad variation of a smile.

Nothing's changed, but she thinks maybe that's best.

.

She punches his arm playfully, "You are not getting anywhere with that kind of language, mister."

His face turns serious. "Did it hurt?"

Curious, she pulls back until the space between them is too much and it's almost unbearable, and asks, "Did what hurt?"

"When you fell out of heaven?"

.

Josh wakes up to snow on his windowsill and ice in his veins and realises that it was nothing more than a nightmare, because her warmth is right next to him (where he's going to make sure it always is).


End file.
